


What's Left

by damnslippyplanet



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Hannibal Lecter is terrible at apologies, Like really terrible, M/M, Murder Ex-Husbands, The dogs will be fine, They tend to involve blood, Time Jump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-16
Updated: 2015-09-23
Packaged: 2018-04-21 02:13:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 9,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4811021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/damnslippyplanet/pseuds/damnslippyplanet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They were on the run together for a long time, and then they weren't.  After a long silence, Hannibal starts trying to reopen lines of communication in his Hannibal way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last he looks for "Chesapeake Ripper" and that's where he finds, for the first time in a long time, there's something new. Something that just might mean "Find me."

“It’s 6:32 a.m. My name is Thomas Miller. I’m in Hartford, Connecticut.”

Will starts most mornings this way, just to hear a voice in his empty home, and to remind himself of things lost, his name the least of them. He blinks sleepily into the mirror, brushes his teeth, and heads down to the kitchen to feed Felix and Hazel.

They circle his ankles, yipping softly in anticipation of breakfast, as he cracks open cans of the good stuff for them. It has occurred to him more than once to wonder if somewhere Jack Crawford is trying to track him through purchases of high-quality dog food the way Alana had once done for Hannibal’s wine and opera tickets. It’s a fairly ridiculous idea but still he switches brands often and sometimes makes his own instead. Cautiousness has become a way of life after seven years. 

Once the dogs are sorted out he takes less care with his own breakfast, cold cereal and a few drops of orange juice that turn out to be all that’s left in the container. He reviews his day while he eats. He’s arranged his life carefully; being a one-man fix-it shop for old and precious things suits him. Two days a week he has to be a real person, meeting clients, making drop-offs of completed repairs, buying groceries. The rest of the week he can haunt the edges of his own life like a ghost, long odd hours in the workshop, driving out to the country for walks with the dogs. 

Today’s a ghost day; no clients. Tension he hadn’t realized he was holding in his shoulders uncoils. There’s no need to be a real person instead of a collection of echoes. He can make progress on the clock he’s restoring and then take the dogs for a run.

Hazel bumps up against his ankle and he scratches her behind the ears absently before reaching for his laptop. It’s one of those days when the itch to brush up against his old life is strong, and he doesn’t really want to fight it. On ghost days he doesn’t have to fight it.

He opens up the laptop and fires up the assorted programs he uses for anonymous browsing. He looks for Molly first, but as usual there’s nothing to find; she went into social media lockdown shortly after Hannibal’s prison break and has never let up. Walter’s a bit easier, young and with a heart that heals more easily, and sometimes a picture of him turns up somewhere. There’s nothing new today.

His fingers still want to type Alana’s name and he breathes through the pain of it, still sharp despite time passed. No need to look up Margot; the widow-heiress pops up in the news from time to time, even as little attention as Will pays to the outside world. She's still beautiful, and her son looks more like Alana every day. Margot hasn't remarried.

Finally he goes looking for Hannibal. He tries the false identities first, but nothing new pops up. He tries Hannibal's real name and gets the usual torrent of trash - sightings, fan pages, conspiracy theories, Chilton's latest book tour. Nothing new. Nothing that says "I'm here if you want to find me, Will." 

Last he looks for "Chesapeake Ripper" and that's where he finds, for the first time in a long time, there's something new. Something that just might mean "Find me."

He stays at the computer for a long time, clock repairs forgotten. Shadows move and lengthen around him.

Eventually Hazel stretches up against the table and sticks her nose into Will's half-eaten cereal bowl. She finishes it joyfully, tags jingling against the bowl. Will doesn't hear or brush her away.

She trots off to drink messily from her water bowl and then comes back to her human, nudging up against him hoping for a treat or a walk. He's not responsive this time, his world focused down to a single computer screen.

After a while Hazel gives up and wanders off to her favorite cushion, where she stretches out for a long nap in the sun.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He takes his time, giving himself every chance to rethink what he’s about to do. He heats up some leftover pizza and eats a few bites before abandoning it. He tries to work on the clock for a while, but its innards spread open remind him too much of the observatory victim and he has to back away from the workbench with visions of Bev in his head.

It’s Freddie's article, of course. She’s always made good money from her “Murder Husbands: Where Are They Now?” spreads. She reports semi-regular sightings of the two of them in places they’ve never been. Once or twice Will wasn’t able to keep Hannibal from calling in his own fake tips. They’re reliable clickbait and Freddie isn’t ever going to let the story die.

So of course she’s the one who breaks the news.

The first killing slips under everyone’s radar. It seems at first like a terrible crime but one without ties to anything else. The Lynches are a small family - father, daughter, mother. Father slumped in the kitchen, riddled with bullets, daughter bled out on the floor. The mother is found first, outside the house. The crime scene doesn't make a lot of sense: why the different kill styles? Is the single white rose on the ground near the mother part of the scene? The investigators work the case, but don't make much headway.

The FBI takes notice of the second killing a few days later - a young woman found early one morning by a security guard making his rounds at the observatory. She's only partially dissected but it's enough for someone to put the pieces together and remember Beverly Katz. Crime scene photo comparisons show the new body placed in the same location as Beverly had been. There's a small arrangement of white roses at her feet.

Looking up the files on Beverly leads to the files on Hannibal and on Will, and that’s when the connection to the first killing comes together. The Lynch murder is just a few blocks from the old Hobbs house, in a neighborhood with many houses built on the same plan. The kitchen layouts are nearly identical. The crime scene photos are eerie - George Lynch propped up against the corner where Garret Jacob Hobbs had ended his life, similar pools of blood. The only difference is that where Abigail Hobbs lived for a while beyond her family’s murder, the Lynch girl did not.

It takes a little while for Freddie to get wind of this and get access to the crime scene photos, and before she can publish, there’s a third killing.

This one is a copycat Randall Tier murder, a young museum employee broken and twisted and bent to the form of a wolf. It’s done so artfully, placed in at the back of the wolf diorama, that the early morning museum employees don’t even see it at first, until the day’s first group of school children starts screaming. But it’s Randall’s museum, and it’s Randall’s death all over again, and when the autopsy is done they find a white rose tucked into the boy’s wrecked ribcage where his heart should be. That’s when Freddie guesses or knows enough to publish.

“MURDER HUSBAND KILLINGS BEGIN AGAIN: Is it a copycat killer or have the Chesapeake Ripper and Insane Profiler Will Graham returned to the scene of their crimes???”

Will can almost see Freddie smiling with satisfaction as she types the third question mark. Not one for subtlety, that woman. Further into the article she’s managed to get her hands on crime scene photos, and Will fights suppressed emotion as he scans through them. They’re perfect echoes of the crime scenes he remembers. These killings were clearly done by someone who had access to the photos, or someone who had been at the original scenes.

In a sidebar, she’s got photos of himself and of Hannibal. He ignores his own photo but looks at Hannibal’s for a long time. The background’s indistinct but he can tell from the short hair that it’s from Hannibal’s time in prison. He’d forgotten how short they kept it. In his memory it’s longer, the way Hannibal kept it while they were together, long enough to run fingers through, long enough to pull on, hard, to bare Hannibal’s neck…

He slams the laptop shut to cut off that train of thought, startling the dogs, and buries his head in his hands. He'd know Hannibal's work anywhere, and even if he hadn’t seen the photos he’d know by the specific crimes Hannibal’s chosen to re-create.

“He’s doing our greatest hits.” Will doesn’t realize he’s spoken aloud until his voice echoes in the sparsely furnished room. His voice sounds harsh and rusty; he hasn’t spoken in hours, looking through the photos, searching for more detail on the crimes, lost in memory.

Will suddenly can’t sit still anymore. He moves quickly toward the door and the dogs run after him, spilling out into the yard gleefully. They walk for a long time, the dogs stopping to sniff every tree and snapping at every squirrel, which they’re usually not allowed to do. Their human doesn’t care about their training today. He’s lost deep in thought, the walk just an excuse to be moving.

When they finally make it back to the house even the dogs are worn out. They trot inside and almost immediately fall into an exhausted sleepy tangle of legs and tails.

Will doesn’t go straight back to the computer. He takes his time, giving himself every chance to rethink what he’s about to do. He heats up some leftover pizza and eats a few bites before abandoning it. He tries to work on the clock for a while, but its innards spread open remind him too much of the observatory victim and he has to back away from the workbench with visions of Bev in his head. 

White roses, for remembrance and new beginnings.

Finally as the sky grows dark, he returns to the computer. He boots up his anonymity software again and goes a few extra steps this time, opening a new throwaway e-mail account, routing his message to be nearly impossible to trace, using every trick he knows from his own training and from Hannibal’s lessons.

He flexes his fingers, takes a deep breath, and starts to type.

_Freddie: Let’s do each other a favor…_

He keeps it short. He offers to trade access to her crime scene information, current and future, for information about the time since the fall from the cliff that she can’t get anywhere in the world but from him or Hannibal. She is not to publish it for at least a year. He thinks she’ll agree, since he intends to drag out the information and she won’t get the rest if she publishes too early. He asks her not to speak to Jack, or the FBI, and he knows Freddie well enough to think that she can be trusted to keep the secret knowing how much gold she can spin from it later.

To be sure she’ll believe him, he attaches a picture, fuzzy from the awkward angle at which he has to take it, but clear enough. _In lieu of signature, see the attached. I think you’ll recognize the scar; you took unauthorized pictures of it once._ She’ll recognize the pattern that Hannibal carved into him. She’ll recognize that it’s faded, old and healed, and that only Will or Hannibal could have taken it.

He’s almost sure she’ll take the bait. He can use her. He should probably feel bad about that, but he isn't entirely the man he used to be and he feels no guilt at all.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He tries to slip back to being a ghost in his life, but memory and pain and desire have been called back from the places where he’d buried them deep over the past five years. His days are long and his sleep is uneasy.

Two days later, Freddie sends more detailed photos of the Lynch house and the museum. She was caught at the observatory and didn’t get anything beyond the two photos she published already, but she’ll try to get more. She sends many questions. Will ignores them; he intends to dole out only a small amount of information until he is very sure that Freddie hasn’t gone to Jack.

But he does open the photos. The detail is remarkable. The angle of Garret Jacob Hobbs’ head perfectly replicated. The sense of motion in the museum employee’s tableau, even in the perfect stillness of death. Will murmurs _beautiful_ under his breath; he doesn’t hear himself, but the dogs perk up their ears.

Hannibal must have taken a long time setting up these scenes for Will to see. The photos have passed through many hands - crime scene technicians, FBI investigators, Freddie’s informants, Freddie, hundreds of thousands of benighted souls who subscribe to Freddie’s paper - but Will knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that they aren’t _for_ any of those people. These photos are for him as surely as if they were sketches by Hannibal’s own hand left on his pillow while he slept. They speak to him as clearly as a whisper in his ear: _See_? 

They’re an invitation, and perhaps as close to an apology as Hannibal Lecter will ever get. Everyone else who touched or saw these photos before Will is just white noise. 

He needs to respond. Until Hannibal knows he’s listening, he’ll just keep re-enacting their past. There’ll be another Dragon; another Bedelia. Hannibal would bring a lot of white roses for his new Bedelia; he’d make a bed for her, sharp thorns pricking her skin, red staining the roses beneath her except for the clean white negative space where her leg should be. 

Will doesn’t have to do any conscious empathing to pluck that knowledge from the air; he just knows it like he knows his own breath. Like he used to know Hannibal’s breath. 

He makes arrangements with Freddie via a different email address. He only asks for a mention in her next piece; an “unnamed former FBI profiler” suggesting that white roses have been known to stand for remembrance or nostalgia. It might slip under Jack’s radar, and if not, Freddie has plausible deniability. The quote could have come from any number of people, or Freddie could have made it up wholesale as she makes up so much of her stories.

But Will knows that Hannibal will be reading, and will know that his message in a bottle made its way across to Will’s hands. And then he’ll do...what? 

Here Will’s knowledge fails him. He’s not sure what Hannibal’s motive is in reaching out now, beyond saying “I haven’t forgotten.” Without knowing that, Will doesn’t know if the next step will be more murders. Maybe Hannibal will go after more people in Baltimore. Maybe he’ll show up at Will’s home. Maybe he’ll go after Freddie. All Will can do is wait.

Assuming Freddie doesn’t end up on Hannibal’s table, Will may need her again, and so he needs to hold up his end of the bargain. He settles at the laptop again and plays back his memories, deciding where to edit them for Freddie. He’s prepared to pay for her intermediary services with some parts of his soul, but not all.

_The fall was endless, the landing shattering. He didn’t wake when the waves washed them up on shore. He didn’t wake when Hannibal dragged him up out of the tide’s reach. He didn’t wake until much later, and when he did, he was stunned and blurry and in shock. He woke up covered in blood, sand, and salt. He stumbled battered to the sea and submerged himself in the water, trying to get clean, and found himself so weak the ocean nearly swept him out to sea again. He nearly let it but he could see Hannibal lying on the sand, not moving, and an impulse beyond thought drove him back to provide what help he could. He woke Hannibal up, shaking him hard, calling in a hoarse voice, half out of his mind. Slowly they limped, half-crawled, away from the sea and from their lives._

He won’t tell her exactly how they found and stole the first boat; that’s a trick he might need again someday. 

_They spent most of the first two weeks sailing as far and as fast as they could away from Maryland, given that they were both of them barely able to stay conscious at first, Will concussed, Hannibal mostly knocked out with what painkillers they could find in the boat’s first aid supplies as he recovered from his injuries. There was a little food. Will managed a little fishing. They didn’t have a plan, other than to get away._

Freddie will ask about the size of the boat. He has no intention of answering. She doesn’t need to know that there were two berths. She doesn’t need to know that they shared the same one anyway, mostly out of exhaustion, the need to tend each other’s injuries, the inability to quite get back out of each other’s minds after slipping in as deeply as they’d done to take down Dolarhyde together. They could barely move, even had they wanted to do anything other than collapse into weary sleep. It was just comfort and warmth and a kind of safety to be utterly known, utterly accepted, utterly held. They rarely spoke in those first days but it wasn’t because there was nothing to say; it was because they were barely separate people at that point, after what they’d been through, after the intensive isolation together. There was nothing that needed to be spoken out loud. They moved in mostly-silent concert through their days, synchronized as dancers or hunting cats.

He could try to explain that the release of years of tension between them had already occurred on the cliff when Dolarhyde fell to his knees, and that the time in the boat was the exhausted but weirdly tender afterglow. He could try but he won’t, not to Freddie. That’s a part of his soul she won’t be getting her teeth into.

_After two weeks they were running low on food and medical supplies and they were getting worried about the boat being identified. They were healed enough by then to dock near another city that Will chooses not to name for Freddie, where Hannibal had some arrangements in place for money and papers. They stole a car. They laid low in hotels for a few weeks and watched the news, waiting for it to be safe to leave the country._

Will pushes back from the table and rubs at his eyes. He hits ‘send’ on the e-mail: that’s all Freddie gets for now. It’ll be enough to keep her wanting more. She’ll put the message to Hannibal in her article. There’s nothing else he can do.

In the following days he tries to stick to his routine. He finishes the clock, still thinking of Beverly sliced apart as he puts the pieces back together, and is glad to get it out of his house and back to its owners. He picks up an antique table that’s been neglected and needs careful restoration. He picks up a boat motor at a flea market just to have something else to keep himself occupied. He does errands. He makes painful small talk with cashiers. He checks in with his dog sitter and lets her know that he may, just maybe, have to leave town on short notice. 

He tries to slip back to being a ghost in his life, but memory and pain and desire have been called back from the places where he’d buried them deep over the past five years. His days are long and his sleep is uneasy even after Felix and Hazel start taking advantage of his distraction to sneak into bed with him at night.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> All these years and Hannibal still manages to be a surprise. Will pours himself a glass of whiskey and takes the laptop over to the window before he opens the attachments. There’s something roiling in his stomach – dread, excitement, curiosity, all mingled confusingly. He draws out the moment as long as he can before he clicks through to see what Hannibal has created for him now.

The next killings take place in rapid fire somewhere no one thinks to look for the Chesapeake Ripper, because no one but Will knows the Ripper was ever there.  It takes a few days for the pieces to be put together - no one was looking for the killer with the white roses across the ocean.  But there he is.  It’s enough to tell Will that his message was received; whatever Hannibal’s doing, he knows Will is listening now, and he’s on to the next phase.

_They’d gone to Germany first, mostly because neither of them had spent much time in the country and there was no particular reason for anyone to expect them there.  They’d taken a room at first in a small hotel in Assmanshausen on the Rhine._

The hotel is where the first body is found.  He’s an older man, travelling on his own, and it takes a couple of days before he’s found, the white rose between his teeth.  No one on the case recognizes the wound pattern.  They wouldn’t.  It was the wound pattern that Hannibal himself had born at the time they were there, and only Will would recognize it.  He’d been the one to bandage and tend those injuries. The gunshot wound, the stabbings, the cuts and bruises from the fall. 

Will could close his eyes and feel Hannibal’s skin warm and fragile under his hands right now if he’d let himself fall into that memory of how readily Hannibal had let himself be vulnerable and cared for by a man who’d thrown him off a cliff a few weeks before.  Will does not allow himself the memory. He can't afford himself the luxury of nostalgia until he knows the rules of the game they're playing.

The second and third bodies are found at daybreak the next day floating in a fountain, a young woman with long blonde hair that was used to strangle her, a young man with wide empty eyes floating alongside her.  Their white roses are just petals, floating thickly on the water’s surface.

It takes a few days for Freddie to get hold of the information.  When she does send the photos she sends only two questions: _Why Germany? Why these three?_

He doesn’t know why those three - likely they were just easy targets in the places Hannibal wanted to make the kills.  But he knows why the places were chosen.  He tells Freddie more or less the truth about the first body - it was a hotel where they had been in hiding together, Hannibal’s revisiting old stomping grounds, working up to something.

He lies and tells her he doesn’t know about the fountain, that it was likely just where pairs of lovers went to make wishes late at night, that Hannibal had found the two an easy target.  He asks her to keep her ear to the ground for any other killings involve white roses.  He gives her some additional meaningless details about their time in Germany to keep her on the hook - restaurants Hannibal had liked, how they’d monitored the FBI watch list for their names.

It’s not until late that night, tossing and turning, that Will lets himself remember the fountain.

_It is, in fact, a lovers’ fountain, but they aren’t lovers yet when they are there together. At least not in any way that Freddie Lounds, Queen of Tattle Crime, would understand._

_They’re walking the long way home to the hotel from a long late dinner: several bottles of wine, a heated argument about psychoanalytic techniques, a warm summer night. Hannibal still has some trouble tiring over long distances and they’ve paused to rest on the fountain’s edge, still debating._

_Will doesn’t have the slightest intention of doing what he does. Like so many of his very best and very worst impulses, it just seems to happen on its own and only later can he try to ascribe meaning to it.  At the time, he just interrupts Hannibal mid-sentence with a fervent "Oh, shut UP" and kisses him.  He can still taste a faint trace of the wine on Hannibal’s lips._

_Hannibal is less surprised than Will would have expected if he’d been stopping to think about it. He doesn’t move any closer; their lips remain the only point of contact between them.  It’s a long kiss, a question seeking and finding an answer, soft at first and then more insistent, lips and teeth, tongues and a disregard for the boring physical necessity of coming up for air. Maybe they’ll drown on dry land if they don’t stop to breathe soon.  Maybe they don’t care._

_When they do break apart, just shy of the drowning point, Hannibal searches Will’s face and seems to not quite find what he’s looking for.  He leans in for another much shorter kiss, there and gone again before Will even has a chance to respond. "You are very drunk, Will. And very desperate to win this argument." Hannibal’s light tone almost hides the yearning. "Come home now."_

_Will is dizzy with wine and kisses and doesn’t protest. He follows Hannibal back to the hotel like a puppy. They’re still sharing a bed without really discussing that fact, but Hannibal simply lies down and goes to sleep as if the fountain had never happened.  Will lies awake for a long time._

The next morning Will fires off a short email to Freddie over breakfast: _If he's following our trail the next ones will be in Madrid.  I’ll tell you about it if you get me pictures._

While he waits, Will hurries to finish his current workload, and turns down a couple of new inquiries.  He tells his clients that he’s preparing to be out of the country for a little while.

But the next reports of white rose killings surface in Boston, not Madrid. Will laughs out loud when he gets Freddie’s email, the sudden noise startling Hazel, who doesn’t hear much laughter.  

All these years and Hannibal still manages to be a surprise.  Will pours himself a glass of whiskey and takes the laptop over to the window before he opens the attachments.  There’s something roiling in his stomach – dread, excitement, curiosity, all mingled confusingly.  He draws out the moment as long as he can before he clicks through to see what Hannibal has created for him now.

The body found in the Boston Opera house is a tenor who looks a little like Will around the eyes. He's costumed as Orpheus, an old costume from a production several years ago that the killer must have gone to special trouble to unearth from costume storage.  His white roses are woven in and around the strings of his lyre, heedless of their sharp thorns. Not all the blood on the thorns is the victim’s. Hannibal bled for this one. Will's first impulse when he sees the photos is to suck in his breath at how it must have hurt. Not the dead man. Hannibal.

In exchange for the photos Will tells Freddie that the two of them had attended that earlier staging of _Orfeo et Euridice_ together in that opera house. He paints her a picture of the two of them scrubbed and polished and passing for perfectly normal people.  He leaves out some details, of course.

_It’s not long after they’ve started wearing plain gold wedding bands – as cover or as truth, Will doesn’t even try to sort out.  Will’s still a little ill at ease in this sort of setting, dressed up, and he fidgets.  He twists the ring back and forth on his finger during the performance until Hannibal reaches over to still and hold his restless hand._

_At intermission Hannibal strikes up a conversation with the couple next to them. He’s his best dinner party self, telling charming stories, elaborating on the mythology.  His eyes strays to Will just before he notes that in Aristophanes’ telling, Orpheus holds great power over wild things.  He uses his musical powers to tame cannibals, and teach them to live peacefully on fruit.  His eyes are wicked but he solicitously pats Will on the back when Will nearly chokes with suppressed laughter and surprise.  Hannibal whisks Will off to find a drink of water, with apologies to their seatmates.  They end up in a dark corner, kissing hard and fast and breathless, rumpling their finery. They aren’t fooling anyone when they make it back to their seats, late into the next act._

Boston had been the last place they'd been together before the end. Will's sure he knows where the next killing will be. He makes arrangements with the dog sitter, shoots Freddie a quick e-mail telling her he’ll be in touch to continue their quid pro quo arrangement if he manages to not get eaten in the next few days, and is on the next plane. As the plane lifts off he closes his eyes and tries not to remember the rest of that story. The cannibals, presumably, live happily ever after even on an altered diet. Orpheus loses his love, wanders the earth, is torn apart, somehow fails to die and lives out an eternity in pieces and isolation. Maybe he should have paid more attention to the rest of that opera.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> With the perspective of years, Will realizes that having moved past Abigail, past bone saws and cliff dives, they probably would have somehow worked through it if he'd stayed. But he didn't stay. He'd packed a single bag, throat raw with yelling and grief, and he'd walked out of Hannibal's life.

Will's too late to save them but he does get there before anyone finds the bodies. He has the advantage of knowing where he and Hannibal lived in that final year. It's isolated, set back from the thinly populated road, doesn’t look like it’s currently occupied. It may be days before the scene is disturbed.

He'd had a conversation with Jack once about the ideal way to investigate a homicide. The way you do it in textbooks and never in real life. One guy alone, before anyone else tramples the scene, seeing everything pristine. In a very odd way, this crime scene is Jack's dream, Will thinks and nearly laughs. He's briefly tempted to leave a note, mess with the clues, screw up the scene, something to let Jack know _I got here first_. But it's something Hannibal would do, not something he would do, and Will does try to keep the difference between them in mind.

They used to keep a spare key hidden in the back. It's still there. Will would bet money it hasn't been there all along, that Hannibal just put it back so Will can come and go undetected from the scene, if he's careful. If he's looking. If he remembers.

The key slides into the lock easy, quiet, like coming home. He takes a deep breath and rests his head against the door for a moment before entering.

The bodies are in the kitchen. Of course they are. That's where the fight happened, the last one, the irreparable breach.  He barely has to close his eyes to summon it.

_He's in the kitchen, barely awake, head nodding over coffee, t-shirt and briefs, when the door opens. Hannibal's been gone for a few days, no word of goodbye but a refrigerator stocked with meals so Will might actually eat something. He does this a few times a year and Will chooses not to notice. Lions need to hunt, but if his semi-tamed lion hunts far from him, doesn't bring home trophies, and doesn't leave a trail of blood back to their door, he chooses not to ask questions. It's the carefully balanced peace they have reached._

_Hannibal usually comes home calm and sated, with the look of a hunger satisfied and sent back to slumber for a few more months. This time he's agitated, or as close to it as he gets.  He stands by the door, bag in hand, looking as if he's barely slept since he left home._

Will opens his eyes again and the scene is there, nearly perfect as if Hannibal's remembered it as clearly as he has. One of the bodies is at the table with a long-cooled cup of coffee in front of him. The other is propped by the door. They're almost unmarked but for a thin line of blood around each forehead and blood seeping through the chests of their shirts.

Will has no desire or need to check, but he is quite certain that when the FBI finds these two and cracks them open they'll find Hannibal has done a little swapping and each man’s chest now holds the other’s heart, each skull now a cradle for the other’s brain. The room is a riot of roses on every available surface, overpowering the beginning of the smells of death.  This is very recent. Hannibal could have just stepped out of the room.

_He'd been frustrated and angry when Hannibal told him they had to move again. Alana's investigators had found their trail and were closing in. They usually both find it a little funny, they’re a little proud of her, how she's always ahead of the FBI. Verger money buys talents the government coffers can't. But they're tired of the running. They both liked their life in this house. Will didn’t want to move again._

_"Damn it," he'd muttered, willing the coffee to hit his brain faster. "Why won't she stop? I sent that message to her, I told her she'd be safe."_

_Hannibal shrugs. They've been over this, the last time, when they left New Orleans barely ahead of Alana's investigators. “She didn't believe you could truly extract that promise from me. Or she never got the message. Or she was still trying to save you."_

_Will gestures around them. The bright comfortable kitchen, his sleepy bed head, a quiet Thursday morning in a mostly quiet life with only occasional bouts of murder. "Do I look like a man who needs saving?"_

_Hannibal smiles despite his restlessness. "Yes. You always have. Alana and I were just trying to save you from different things.”_

_It's a little thing, the past tense. There's no reason it should trip the circuit in his brain that makes connections his conscious mind can't. But he knows, sudden and harsh and painful. Where Hannibal's been. Who his quarry was this time.  "Oh, no. Hannibal, what did you do?"_

_Hannibal approaches cautiously, as if Will is a dog who might bite. "I didn't see another option. She wouldn't stop. She'd have caught us next time, or the time after. We warned her off and she kept coming."_

_"No. No, no, no --" He's not really aware of what he's saying, out of his chair, coffee knocked over. Alana. Alana who tried so hard to save him from what he didn’t want to be saved from._

_"I tried to be merciful. She went in her sleep. It will look like natural causes if no one looks too closely. It was the only thing to do."_

_"You could have talked to me. We could have done something else. Fuck, Hannibal, you promised me--"_

_"I meant the promise. I hadn't intended to hurt her. I'd have let her go if she’d just gone back to blindness. Will—“_

Will's eyes snap open in the present, that memory too painful to stay in. The fight had lasted hours but really it had been over in those first minutes. Alana was the unforgivable sin, or it seemed so that day. With the perspective of years, Will realizes that having moved past Abigail, past bone saws and cliff dives, they probably would have somehow worked through it if he'd stayed.  But he didn't stay. He'd packed a single bag, throat raw with yelling and grief, and he'd walked out of Hannibal's life. He'd thought for a while Hannibal might have come after him, to apologize or to kill him or both, but it had never happened.  Will just vanished into a new life and Hannibal never came looking.

Will steadies himself on the counter (reaches out for it blind, still remembers where it is, so many mornings and evenings spent here watching Hannibal move sure and swift around this room) and looks around for anything he's missed.

He almost does miss it, but finally he sees it. A small slip of paper, slid under the rim of the saucer

Hannibal's fine script, just one word: "NOLA."  Hannibal must have been so sure Will would get here before the police. And he was right. Of course. He's nearly always right.

Will folds the paper and tucks it away in a pocket and looks around the house one more time. However this plays out, he won't be back here again once the police figure out it's a crime scene. From the airport he texts Freddie the address of the scene and suggests she get there quickly before the cops do.  She probably doesn’t know that her getting eaten was always an acceptable risk in this hunt he’s on, but he’s oddly glad that she didn’t, and it might be useful later to have her owe him a favor. 


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hannibal doesn’t fight Will’s characterization; he knows what he is. “I never promised you normality, Will.”
> 
> “I suppose you didn’t. But we did such a good imitation of it for a while there.” He’d meant to hide the longing in his voice, but is pretty sure it didn’t work. It's the everyday stuff he misses as much as the sexy-murder-fugitives-on-the-run stuff. Lazy mornings. Errands. Private jokes. It was all so normal except when it really, really wasn't.

Will sleeps a little bit on the plane to Louisiana, waking up only when the plane touches down. He rents an inconspicuous car and drives straight for Constance Street. 

This time he doesn't even have to look for the spare key. The door's unlocked. The house smells amazing, something simmering on the stove. Hannibal’s stretched out on the sofa, eyes closed.

Will watches him from the doorway. His hair is a little longer, streaked with more silver. There are some lines on his face that Will doesn’t remember. He’s wearing an impeccable shirt, sleeves rolled up for cooking. He looks peaceful. He doesn’t move when he opens his eyes, just looks across the room at Will.

They observe each other for a long moment, the first time they’ve been in a room in five years. It feels like yesterday and like twenty years ago all at once.

“I thought you might not get here for another day or two,” Hannibal finally says. “Did you get on the first plane?”

“The second. I had some things to take care of.” Will drops into a chair. He doesn’t want to stare but he can’t seem to take his eyes off Hannibal. He’d remembered him so accurately in all those years of replaying memories, and yet it’s different having him here in person. Will wonders how different he looks to Hannibal after five years of being a ghost. 

“Thank you for coming.” It’s gravely courteous, controlled, the tone impossible to read.

Whatever’s happening here, it’s polite. Will’s fairly sure he’s not walking into an ambush. If he’s about to be attacked it’s not going to happen this very moment, and he lets himself relax the tiniest bit. “It was a hard invitation to refuse. You killed eleven people to get me to have dinner with you.”

“Thirteen, actually.” Hannibal does at least sound very slightly sheepish about this.

Will closes his eyes and leans back. “You did go to Spain.”

“It’ll take a while for them to be found. I left them --”

“I know where you left them.” Will cuts him off mostly to distract himself from the rising heat in his face; he knows exactly what had happened in Spain that Hannibal would have felt the need to commemorate on his World Commemorative Tour of Will and Hannibal’s Best Fugitive Memories. “What is this about? You couldn’t have picked up a phone?”

“The phone book doesn’t have a ‘Will Graham’ listing anymore.”

“You could have found me if you wanted to. I never did change names again. I’m still Thomas. In case you were looking.” He probably shouldn’t admit that, but what the hell. This pretty much ends with a reconciliation, or with one or both of them leaving the house in body bags, so there’s not much point in playing coy.

“Then let’s say I wasn’t sure you would welcome my attempts to find you. I thought it would be better to let myself be found if you wished to seek me.”

Will passes a hand over his eyes. “Only you, in all the world, go on a murder spree scavenger hunt to get your ex to call because you’re afraid he might hang up if you call first.”

“Only me in all the world.” Hannibal doesn’t fight Will’s characterization; he knows what he is. “I never promised you normality, Will.”

“I suppose you didn’t. But we did such a good imitation of it for a while there.” He’d meant to hide the longing in his voice, but is pretty sure it didn’t work. It's the everyday stuff he misses as much as the sexy-murder-fugitives-on-the-run stuff. Lazy mornings. Errands. Private jokes. It was all so normal except when it really, really wasn't.

“I need to tend the vegetables. Come into the kitchen with me?” Hannibal’s up and moving, and Will notes he’s still graceful, but a little slow. Favoring an injury, maybe. Or maybe they’re just neither of them as young as they used to be. 

He follows Hannibal into the kitchen, doesn’t comment when Hannibal hands him a bottle of what was his favorite beer five years ago, and sits down at the counter to watch Hannibal work. “Tell me why I’m here, please.”

Hannibal finishes up the carrot he’s slicing before responding. “I had an incident, recently. An encounter with someone who was more committed to living than I had anticipated.” He unbuttons two buttons, displaying the end of what looks like a fresh and ugly scar down his chest. It must have hurt. It looks near-lethal. He leaves the buttons undone and Will tries to ignore how distracting that is. Hannibal picks up the knife and resumes work. “For the first time in several years I thought I was going to die. It occurred to me at that moment that I didn’t want to die without seeing you again.” His tone is light and conversational, as if he were saying “I saw a TV show that made me think of you so I sent you a Facebook message.”

Will stares, just a little. “You...thought of me, for the first time in a while. And it sent you on a trans-oceanic murder spree.”

“I’ve never been able to maintain an appropriate level of restraint where you were concerned. And I didn’t say it was the first time in a while. I’ve thought of you every day.”

“Jesus, Hannibal.”

“Did you ever think of me?”

 _Every morning I wake up alone. I came damn close to naming my dog after you so I’d have an excuse to say your name every day._ “You know I did.”

“It also occurred to me that I never apologized properly for breaking my promise to you. I hoped you would give me a chance to rectify that.”

This is going to hurt. Will steels himself for the pain. “Say Alana’s name if you’re going to apologize for her.” 

Hannibal pauses then, puts his knife down, looks at Will and takes a deep breath as if to show he’s taking this seriously, both Alana herself and Will’s feelings about her death. “Alana. I am sorry that I broke my promise to honor her safety. I’m not precisely sorry about killing her - I thought it had to be done to protect you, and I would have killed many more people for that. But I’m sorry for how it happened, and that I wasn’t able to think of another way.”

Will doesn’t precisely accept the apology - nothing ever could make up for the enormity of the breach - but he looks away first, and allows just the slightest hint of a nod. Acknowledgement, if not acceptance.

He sits in silence for several minutes, nursing the beer and thinking that he’s an idiot for nursing the beer because there’s about a 50/50 chance that this ends in blood and he dies on the kitchen floor because his reflexes were slowed. Maybe 50/40, with a 10 percent chance that the beer is poisoned. 

He drinks the beer anyway because this is all so familiar and he misses it so terribly, sitting at this table watching Hannibal do magic things with food. He’s not made of stone. If he’s going to die tonight, this might not be such a bad way to spend his last hour.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They talk about the dinner. They talk about what’s changed in New Orleans. Hannibal tells a few entertaining stories about his adventures in recent years that don’t end in anyone getting eaten. Will makes a point of not asking about the meat. No one gets stabbed.
> 
> At some point near the end of the meal, Will has the startling realization that he feels like a person. Fully in his skin, fully seen, for the first time he can remember in a very long time. Maybe since he walked out of the Boston house five years ago. It feels good. And dangerous.

Finally, once things are things sizzling and roasting and no longer in need of his immediate attention for the next few minutes, Hannibal turns back to Will at the table. Will’s still just sitting there, easy in his chair, adrift somewhere in time between past and present, wondering what he’d give up to freeze time right here. Wondering if he even has anything left to give up besides the dogs.

“I did have an additional motive in asking you here.”

“You always do.” Will hears a faint note of fondness in his own voice and knows, _knows_ that it shouldn’t be there, but that nameless thing between them is stirring from a long slumber and he feels bewitched, unable or perhaps unwilling to say whatever magic word would send it back to sleep. 

“I haven’t been much accustomed to loneliness.” Will’s almost sure Hannibal is being sincere, although it’s never something you’d want to bet your life on. “I thought I could return to a new semblance of my old life once you left. It turned out to be more difficult than I had anticipated.”

Will snorts rudely. “You seemed to be doing all right as far as I could tell. I see the papers.” Hannibal’s been fairly restrained, for Hannibal, but there’s still been a news report of a particularly elaborate killing every once in a while that he saw and just knew whose hand had designed them. Sometimes he let himself imagine he’d been there. Sometimes he let himself imagine he’d held the knife.

Hannibal neither confirms nor denies, but then he doesn’t really need to. “Even so. The snake can’t crawl back into the skin he’s shed, even if he tries for a time.”

“You’re mixing your metaphors. Doesn’t seem wise for the snake to extend a dinner invitation to the mongoose.”

“No metaphors then, Will. I wanted to hear your voice and to see your face again, and if that’s all, then it will be enough. But I had hoped you might tell me whether all the shared corners of our memory have burned to ash, or whether there might be something left to rekindle. I would give up a great deal to have you back in my life.”

 _Yes. No. You’re completely insane. I might be completely insane too._ Will’s at a loss and settles for, “That’s remarkably straightforward of you.”

“I waited for you to make the first move last time. It took months. We don’t have months here. Jack Crawford will find this house eventually. We may have to dispense with elliptical approaches."

Will stares hard at the label on the beer bottle. “I don’t know what to say to that right now.”

Hannibal nods and goes back to stirring something on the stove. It seems to be enough for him that he didn't get an immediate “no.” Probably Will should have given him an immediate “no.” Probably Will shouldn’t be here.

"I wasn’t expecting an immediate response. The chess pieces are on the table. You can think about your next move. Let’s talk about something else for a while.”

And they do, over dinner, which is the best thing Will’s eaten in years. There’s no blood, no reminiscing about anything too painful or intimate, no recrimination. They talk about the dinner. They talk about what’s changed in New Orleans. Hannibal tells a few entertaining stories about his adventures in recent years that don’t end in anyone getting eaten. Will makes a point of not asking about the meat. No one gets stabbed.

At some point near the end of the meal, Will has the startling realization that he feels like a person. Fully in his skin, fully seen, for the first time he can remember in a very long time. Maybe since he walked out of the Boston house five years ago. It feels good. And dangerous.

Hannibal catches the change in mood, of course he does, features still but eyes alive and dark with things unspoken as he studies Will's expression. "Tell me what you're thinking."

"I'm trying to figure out what would be different. You're still going to kill people. I'm still not going to kill people."

"But you still want to." It's not a question.

Will's suddenly so tired. They've been doing this dance since Randall Tier. He feels too old to learn new steps. "I abstain. I know you don't understand that. We've talked it to death. Nothing's changed."

Hannibal looks like he wants to argue that, but he doesn't, and maybe that's a small change in itself. He rises and starts to clear the table.

Will puts a restraining hand on Hannibal's arm and tries not to think about how long it's been since they touched. "Let me. I could use the thinking time."

He rolls up his sleeves and gets to work running a sink full of soapy water so hot he can barely stand it. The dishwasher doesn't suit his needs tonight. He wants to keep busy. He washes everything by hand, one piece at a time, slow and thorough. He shoos Hannibal out of the room and hand dries everything himself. It's peaceful and meditative and if he's doing this, he's not thinking about Francis Dolarhyde or Spain or the two years he spent on the run with Hannibal or the five hollow years since. He's not thinking about Felix and Hazel probably sitting on all the forbidden furniture waiting for him to come home. He's not thinking about Alana or Abigail or the thousand small and large betrayals that exist between his first meeting with Hannibal and this evening. He's not thinking about forgiveness and second chances and the possibility that even snakes and mongooses might learn to change.

Finally he's done and he pulls the plug, watching soapy water swirl down the drain. For a moment the bubbles appear pink-tinged with blood but he blinks and they're back to normal. He tries to remember if he had more or fewer murder hallucinations during those years on the run. He remembers sleeping better, knowing he wasn't alone.

There's music playing softly in the other room. There's love of a fierce and bloody kind if he’ll take it, and companionship if that’s all he’ll allow and, he would bet, a glass of wine poured and waiting for him. There's Hannibal.

There's also the front door. He could leave the clean dishes as his farewell gift and walk out right now. He's pretty sure Hannibal wouldn't try to stop him, that he had meant it when he said talking this last time would be enough if that’s all Will has to give. This wouldn't be a bad good-bye, really: a good meal and a companionable evening and some bittersweet nostalgia. It would be better than how they'd left it after Alana. He could maybe get on with some sort of actual life, with a bit of closure.

Will stands in the kitchen for a long time twisting the dish towel in his hands, watching but not really seeing fireflies outside the window. Hannibal does not call out to him from the other room. He waits and thinks and remembers.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Oh, this is such a bad idea. Everything Will’s been doing for the past week is a terrible idea. He should have packed up the dogs, changed his name again, and vanished into another new life the instant he understood what Hannibal was doing.

“I’m tired, Hannibal.”

Will’s in the doorway of the living room again, hands in pockets, leaning his head against the frame. Hannibal’s back on the sofa, eyes closed to listen to the music, and sure enough, he’s poured two glasses of wine. He’s already well into his own glass; Will’s stands on a tabletop near the sofa.

His former lover, fake husband, attempted-killer-several-times-over, quarry, predator, co-fugitive - whatever Hannibal is on any given day - opens his eyes and looks genuinely regretful. “I’m sorry. You must be, after your flight and chasing me all over. Stay. You can have the bedroom, I’ll sleep here. We can continue our discussion tomorrow. We should have at least a few days before Jack finds this house.”

Hannibal’s giving him an out and Will considers it, but only for a moment. “That’s not what I meant. I’m not that kind of tired.”

“You’re half asleep on your feet. I do remember what that looks like. Go to bed, Will.”

“Okay, yes, I am that kind of tired. But I meant I’m tired of everything else. I’m tired of being Thomas Miller.” Oh, this is such a bad idea. Everything Will’s been doing for the past week is a terrible idea. He should have packed up the dogs, changed his name again, and vanished into another new life the instant he understood what Hannibal was doing. But he’s here and Hannibal’s waiting for him to go on. “I didn’t know it until tonight. I forgot that you make me feel like a whole person, and I don’t think I can go back to being half a person.”

Hannibal considers that seriously before responding. “I’m not particularly good at being a person myself. But I’m older and arguably wiser now. I might be able to learn.”

This is a terrible decision but it’s the only one that doesn’t make Will want to go find the nearest cliff and throw himself off it, and do it right this time. He doesn’t think he can go back to being a ghost, now that he’s reminded what being alive felt like. He’d like to believe that people can change, even Hannibal. Even himself. 

“We could try. To see what’s left. I don’t think there’s ever going to be anyone else for either of us, is there?”

“It’s extraordinarily unlikely.” Hannibal’s fingers flex slightly, digging into the sofa arm, and Will knows he’s having a hard time staying where he is.

“You’ll stop with the Magical Memory Murder Tour.”

“Yes.”

“You’ll keep your promises to me this time.”

“I swear to you that I will try. And that if I find I can't, I will tell you first. It’s what I can offer.”

Will’s quiet, considering that. It is, he believes, what Hannibal can offer. It may be enough of a foundation on which to try rebuilding from the ruins. 

“Are you familiar with the art of kintsugi, Will?”

“This is an odd moment for you to launch into one of your lectures on art history, isn’t it?”

Hannibal smiles at that but continues. “Hear me out. I was at an exhibition of kintsugi not long ago and I wished you were there with me. It’s a very old Japanese art form. Broken ceramic pieces are repaired, but the artists don’t try to hide the seams. They join the shards with lacquer and decorate the joins with gold dust to highlight what is mended and transformed. They honor what is broken and in doing so, make the piece more precious. They transform brokenness into something new and beautiful. Bowls. Plates.”

“Teacups?”

Their eyes meet and Hannibal’s smile is unusually uncomplicated, pure with the joy of Will’s understanding. “Teacups. I would have liked to show you the teacups, Will.”

It’s awfully late in Will’s life for him to become a believer in the reconstitution of shattered things, but that smile pierces him to the core and he knows this was never really going to end any other way. He lets go and falls.

He holds out a hand. “Come on. That sofa was never any good for sleeping. We’re leaving at dawn. Let’s get some rest.” 

They just sleep that night, but they sleep in the same bed, their old bed, breathing the same slow breaths.

At some point just before Hannibal falls asleep Will rolls over and touches him gently to stir him from the dream he’s about to fall into. “Hey. I need to tell you something. If we’re going to try this thing again.”

“Mmm?”

“We have dogs now. We’re going to have to go back to Connecticut to pick them up.”

“Mm.” Hannibal’s barely awake. “Dogs. Okay. Keep them out of my closet.”

“Also.”

“Mm?”

“I sort of gave an interview about us to Freddie Lounds. I don’t think the Murder Husbands thing is going away anytime soon. We might need to go into deep cover for a while. You, me, and the dogs. I hope you have another safe house somewhere.”

Hannibal’s eyes snap open. Whatever he was expecting, it wasn’t that.

For the first time in many, many years, there’s a sound of laughter in the empty house.


	9. Chapter 9

_Will flops back on the bed nearly breathless but laughing with the little breath he has, disheveled and flushed. “Jesus, Hannibal. What was that?”_

_Hannibal kisses him long and deep before answering. “Did you want the medical term or the vulgar? I believe the Latin etymology--”_

_“Oh my god, shut up, I know what it’s CALLED.” He starts to run his hands over Hannibal’s chest and then sits up, suddenly worried about Hannibal’s gunshot wound, the mostly-healed remnant of Francis Dolarhyde. “Hey, are you okay? Should we have done that?”_

_“I’m healing well and I've been waiting for you to do that for a long time. Come here.” They settle back into the bed in their rental cottage in Madrid. It’s a hot lazy afternoon, a single bird singing outside but the world is otherwise still - it might be just the two of them in all the universe._

It’s that same cottage where Hannibal will leave a pair of bodies six years later under a concealing blanket of white roses. They’ll be the last of the White Rose bodies to be found before that killer drops off the map. The aborted killing spree will leave international authorities confused and frustrated, holding a cold case without the key to understanding what the murders were for. 

Freddie Lounds will receive an obscenely large bouquet of red roses with a card reading simply "Thank you." The script will be flowing and beautiful. Freddie will trace the florist delivery back to the alias under which Hannibal owns the New Orleans house, as perhaps she was meant to, a final thank you for her services in a game she wasn't fully aware she was playing. She'll tip Jack Crawford off and he'll find the house eventually. But by the time all the pieces come together, the house will be empty again. Will and Hannibal will be gone into new identities. Even the dogs will have new names. They won't leave any trace for Jack to follow. 

_But that’s all in the future. That afternoon, six years before the room becomes a crime scene, there is only Will and Hannibal. They’re overwhelmed and a little tentative in the wake of the first time they undo each other that completely. They lie together in the afternoon heat, sweat cooling on their skin, pulses beginning to drop back to normal. They make plans. They kiss sweet and aching and slow. They think maybe in a few more months it will be safe to return to the States. There’s no hurry. They have all the time in the world._

**Author's Note:**

> This is going to be a slow one; it's plotty and I need to work out some chapters ahead before I post more. But you have all been so sweet with the nice feedback on my first stories that I wanted to give you a free sample. Stay tuned. Feel free to come hang with me at [my Tumblr](http://damnslippyplanet.tumblr.com) in the meanwhile.
> 
> The title and much of the mood are borrowed from Ali Shapiro's poem "[Leave Me Alone But Take Me With You](http://www.decompmagazine.com/shapiropoems.htm)."
> 
> P.S. The dogs will always be okay. I make no promises about anyone else.


End file.
